Early Tuesday morning, tragedy struck in Italy, the largest city in Rome, as a highway bridge, the Morandi Bridge, collapsed over Genoa, causing people, cars and huge slabs of concrete to fall hundreds of feet onto the city below.
The Associated Press quotes government officials as saying that, at least, 20 people were found dead in the rubble, while other accounts put the death count even higher at above 30 in what Italy’s deputy transportation minister called Europe’s worst major bridge disaster in decades.
“My country was wounded today as innocents lost their lives unjustly. I pray for the victims and their families and thank the emergency services who are working tirelessly on the scene”, President Antonio Tajani noted in a tweet on his Twither handle, @EP_President.
That unfortunate incident in Italy holds a grave lesson for Nigeria as it calls to mind quickly the disaster probably waiting to happen in Apapa, the country’s premier port city, where thousands of trailers and tankers surging towards the ports, are parked almost permanently on the Ijora-Apapa Bridge, exerting enormous pressure on the bridge and weakening its structural stability.
The collapsed Morandi Bridge is a 1960s-era bridge and, according to the ANSA news agency, it had long been in a chronic state of stress and decay, adding that, though there had been major structural work performed within the last two years, authorities now suspect it was still weak.
It is easy to see a similarity between the Morandi Bridge and Ijora-Apapa Bridge in terms of age, stress and decay. The Nigerian bridge, according to Babatunde Fashola, the country’s minister for Power, works and housing, was built 40 years ago and has not received any form of maintenance for that long period of time it was constructed.
This is a bridge where all the iron rods at its connecting joints have been exposed by constant wear and tear by heavy duty and articulated vehicles. The bridge is already weak and tired with numerous craters on virtually every spot and is heavily flooded after every bout of rain, yet government, whose responsibility it is to repair and maintain it looks away and hundreds of trucks make it their permanent parking lot.
Civil and structural engineers have warned of the danger in allowing trucks to be permanently parked on the Apapa bridge.
“Though it is most unlikely that the bridge structure and integrity will be adversely affected from the point of view of overload from the ‘empty’ trucks, many of those trucks are not in perfect condition”, noted Gabriel Ojo, a civil engineer at Sanni, Ojo & Partners Consulting Limited, in a telephone interview.
“And because many of them are not in perfect condition, the trucks are likely to have oil, including petrol, diesel, engine oil, brake oil, dripping on the bridges; these are organic solvents that naturally dissolve the asphalt topping and cause the bridges topping and the decks to deteriorate very fast”, he explained.
Femi Akintunde, a structural engineer and GMD/CEO, Alpha Mead Group, affirms, stressing however that heavy duty trucks packed at close proximity to one another and in static condition over a long period of time have adverse impact on the bridges. “What this implies is that the combined weight of the vehicles packed in this condition will be far more than what the bridge was designed to carry under normal condition”.
“The implication of this situation is that the higher concentration of the static load of these closely parked trucks on the bridge will subject its structures to high degrees of stress at the various joints and support joints than normal, leading to faster wear and tear at critical points, which ultimately puts the structural integrity of the bridges at great risk of collapse or catastrophic failure”.
The Morandi Bridge, which stands 300 feet high, spans a three-quarter-mile section of the coastal city, and carries highway traffic between Italy and France. “Traffic was likely especially heavy on Tuesday”, the AP wrote, “as vacationers headed out in advance of a major Italian holiday”.
This means that heavy traffic is capable of collapsing a bridge and it could be argued that the Italian bridge couldn’t have been as busy and stressed as Apapa Bridge which witnesses over 2,000 private and commuter vehicles daily plus the stationary trucks which are piling pressure on it every minute.
In the last 10 years, Apapa has been in the news for the wrong reason. It has become notorious for traffic gridlock. Several efforts to bring sanity to this part of a state that prides itself as a mega city and one of Rockefeller’s 100 resilient cities in the world has failed.
Going to this port city has become a nightmare as all routes to the city have become “highway to hell” and the attendant costs to businesses and risk to commuters that have to go to Apapa every day.
CHUKA UROKO
